Sasaki Ken

Born 1976 in Kanagawa, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Sasaki Ken engages with figurative painting as a reflexive activity, particularly through a sustained interrogation of yōga (Western-style painting) and the masculinist and authoritarian structures of its formal and institutional legacies. His work connects this tradition to contemporary social contexts, pursuing painting’s potential as a mode of critique. This approach is most vividly articulated in his detailed renderings of subjects long excluded from dominant art-historical frameworks—handicrafts by women, drawings by his brother with a disability, and mundane household objects. This exhibition presents a selection of Sasaki’s works produced since the 2010s and introduces his varied painterly approaches.